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Spoonfuls of Medicine, Marketed for Centuries

When images overtook text in patent medicine advertisements, 19th century visions of health flowered in profusion all over the world. “Man as Industrial Palace,” center, is a work that combines the Lilliputian charms of “Where’s Waldo?,” Willy Wonka’s factory, the world’s best dollhouse and a fun pinball game.Credit
Posters From The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The William H. Helfand Collection

Everyone knows you can’t buy health, but that has never stopped anyone from trying to sell it to you. As a small, gorgeous and fiercely funny exhibition of posters at the Philadelphia Museum of Art makes clear, the marketing of this particular noncommodity is an enduring art in every sense of the word.

The basic gambit has probably not changed since the Stone Age: a concerned stranger presents you with a vision of the future, starring either a happier, better you with the use of a certain product, or a sadder-but-wiser, considerably more miserable you without it. For centuries all was word of mouth, but with the birth of the modern poster in the late 19th century the visions suddenly became visual, flowering in large and colorful profusion all over the world.

Early adopters straddled the Atlantic. In the United States they included Prof. P. H. van der Weyde, M.D., inventor of the genuine German Electro Galvanic Belt for ailments including liver, stomach and kidney diseases (“beware of imitations”), and M. K. Paine, a pharmacist in Windsor, Vt., who compounded Green Mountain Balm of Gilead from the resins of local evergreens.

In France, the famous Dr. Guillaume Dupuytren, having devised an operation for a hand condition that still bears his name, moved on to the presumably more lucrative problem of baldness before he died in 1835. His hair-strengthening pomade was still going strong in the 1860s, celebrated in respectful neoclassical style against a hot pink background.

The familiar verbal effluvia of the patent medicine industry clutter some early posters. The Green Mountain balm is “universally acknowledged to be the best Plaster ever known,” with an entire paragraph in small print enumerating its target ills, from pain and internal inflammation through lameness, boils and corns. Dr. Trikos, purveyor of an eponymous lotion for irritations of the skin and baldness, summarized it all eloquently: “I have cured myself, I have cured my friends, and I wish to cure all who suffer.”

The words eventually fell away, though, and the images took center stage, helped along by some of the best-known poster artists of the time.

Jules Chéret, the master of Belle Époque poster art, dispatched two of his vivacious gauze-clad young women to the cause of Vin Mariani, the wine that refreshes body and brain and restores health and vivacity. Each demoiselle gaily pours herself a glass; for neither, clearly, is it her first. Leonetto Cappiello, the Italian-born French artist called “father of modern advertising,” created an ecstatic senior citizen dancing in dressing gown and slippers after Uricure repaired his joints.

Drinking buddies every bit as unforgettable as the glorious Parisiennes were sketched by an anonymous Hungarian artist, but here the tall guy in charge of the bottle has a black robe and a skull’s head, while his small, flushed companion in baggy work clothes and a large droopy mustache is clearly headed for trouble. (A temperance philanthropy was behind that one.) Skulls are deployed elsewhere to make dire points about syphilis, while a gigantic black spider does the honors for TB.

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But the star of the show may be the single image intended neither to cajole nor to terrify but to educate and amuse. The five-volume anatomy and physiology textbook that the German physician Fritz Kahn brought out in the 1920s was illustrated with a poster-size folding color plate depicting “Man as Industrial Palace,” a work that combines the Lilliputian charms of “Where’s Waldo?,” Willy Wonka’s factory, the world’s best dollhouse and a really good pinball game.

Up in the chambers of the brain, two groups of tiny men in suits and ties deliberate around small conference tables: they are, of course, Will and Reason. Nearby a lone fellow in shirtsleeves and headphones operates a telegraph: he is Hearing, while the photographer one cubicle over is Sight.

Gears move particles of food along the alimentary tract, aided by tiny workers with rakes and cauldrons of digestive enzymes. Down in Bone Marrow a solitary artisan stamps out red blood cells.

It is an image begging to be animated, and the contemporary German designer Henning M. Lederer has done just that, in a short film looping alongside the actual lithograph. There is no need to travel to Philadelphia for this particular pleasure, though; Mr. Lederer’s utterly irresistible creation is online at http://www.vimeo.com/6505158.

Any immersion in medical history is likely to produce a stereotyped set of reflections on the remarkably short lifespan of most good medical advice and the remarkably enduring nature of the motivations behind it. Altruism and the hard sell have always been intertwined. In fact, William H. Helfand, a retired Merck executive and collector of medical memorabilia whose many donations to the museum include the 50-odd items in the show, goes on record in the catalog ruefully acknowledging patent medicine salesmen as his “figurative ancestors.”

The bold images on display here prompt one more reflection. As our technical understanding of health becomes ever more pixilated in dull shades of gray, muted by risk and benefit and by statistical slicing and dicing, the giant assertions splashed over these gallery walls are more appealing than ever.